SMELLODI: Smart Electronic Olfaction for Body Odor Diagnostics

SMELLODI is an EIC Pathfinder Open funded project that aims to develop intelligent electronic sensors that can detect and digitally transmit healthy and pathologically altered body odours. Over a period of three years and with funding of almost 3 million euros, the developed technology is to pave the path for the digitization of the sense of smell. The international consortium is formed by Dresden University of Technology (Germany, coordinator), Tampere University (Finland), University of Jena (Germany), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) and SmartNanotubes Technologies (Germany).

The research team at Tampere University develops a self-learning odor display prototype. The aim is to study if a recipe for an unknown scent can be produced from known odor components using an electronic nose (eNose), an olfactory display, and optimization algorithms. Using the eNose, the odor display first measures the electronic fingerprint of the target odor. The first approximation of the target odor is reproduced by the olfactory display. The reproduced odor is measured again by the eNose and the two fingerprints are compared. Certain optimization methods (i.e. stochastic search algorithms) are used to iteratively improve the recipe of the reproduced odor to minimize the difference between the two responses. Human tests are also used to verify that the synthesized odor has high resemblance to the original one. The display can act as a terminal device for delivering odors transferred over the communication network.